Why teaching only search algorithms in a short introductory AI course?
There is lots of misconceptions about AI, specifically the idea that it is about making computers "think" like humans, simulating brain, the sci-fi robots taking over the world, all the philosophical discussions around brain as machine etc. The practice/reality of AI is about "using computing to solve problems" which basically means you take any problem, represent it as a computing problem and then design the algorithm to solve the computing problem which lead to solving the original problem. These search algorithms are general purpose algorithms for general purpose computing problems i.e any real world problem can be represented by these general purpose computing problem and then these algorithms can be used to solve them.

Remember, its about problem solving and its about general purpose computing problems that can represent any real world problem.